5 Coffees a Day Cut Risk of Most Severe Breast Cancer

Drinking five or more cups of coffee a day may lower risk of an especially aggressive type of breast cancer, according to Swedish researchers.

Their study, reported online Wednesday in Breast Cancer Research, found an association between consuming five or more cups of coffee daily and a reduction in ER-negative breast cancer, the most virulent type of the breast disease.

"Now, we don't have all the details," study co-author Dr. Per Hal, a professor in the medical epidemiology and biostatistics department at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, told Health Day. "We don't know, for example, what specific type of coffee we're talking about here. But what we do know is that the protective effect is quite striking and remains even after adjusting for a lot of other factors that have the potential to play a protective role. And we know that we're talking about what we could call a relatively normal amount of coffee drinking. Certainly we're not talking about consuming gigantic amounts of coffee. So, this is a very intriguing finding."

The study involved 5,929 Swedish women, aged 50 to 74; about half of them had breast cancer. The participants filled out questionnaires that assessed health behaviors and characteristics, including exercise routines, family history of breast cancer, coffee consumption, and more.

The researchers’ primary discovery was that coffee drinking appeared to prompt a “strong reduction” in risk for ER-negative breast cancer, they wrote. Participants who drank five cups daily had a 33 percent to 57 percent lower risk of the disease compared with those who drank less than one cup a day.

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